SETERMOEN, Norway — The Norwegian Army has dropped tennis balls on tanks to test new attack strategies for drones, drawing on tactics seen on the battlefields of Ukraine.

Officials staged the evaluation as part of NATO exercise Joint Viking 2025, held in Northern Norway earlier this month. The idea was to test intelligence and surveillance tactics involving the deployment of different types of unmanned aerial vehicles.

Among them were first-person-view drones, or FPVs, used by Ukrainian and Russian forces to attack enemy positions or equipment. Skilled operators have been able to steer the remote-controlled drones into the open hatches of tanks and armored vehicles, blowing up their deadly charge inside.

In the context of the exercise, the drones carried tennis balls to simulate munitions hitting Norwegian armored vehicles, according to Maj. Tor Sellevold, who works for Combat Lab, the Norwegian Army’s land warfare centre testing unmanned technologies.

The Norwegian Army tested new surveillance and attack strategies for drones during the Joint Viking 2025 exercise in Northern Norway in March 2025.

“To simulate attacks on participating forces, tennis balls were dropped and FPVs were flown in dive attack patterns to simulate modern-day drone threats — the purpose was to provide insights to the participants of their own aerial signature, experience the threat from top-attack drones, and evaluate their standard operating procedures,” he told Defense News in an email.

Over 30 tennis balls were dropped during the ten sorties the FPVs carried out, he added. This represented the first time that the Norwegian Army conducted such testing with attack drones at that scale.

In Ukraine, cheap drones have proven increasingly capable of striking larger Russian platforms, such as combat helicopters, as a result of their fast-paced development, which now allows them to fly faster and further than at the start of the conflict.

The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense recently announced the creation of the Drone Line project, which seeks to establish a 15 kilometer unmanned “kill zone” along the front lines. The plan entails the deployment of a mix of surveillance and strike drones.

The Norwegian military has been paying close attention to all the developments ongoing in Ukraine regarding drone warfare.

As part of its operations, the Army’s military intelligence battalion plans to operate drones from further back from the battle space, an officer within the unit, who wished not to be named, told Defense News.

“Our unit [Norwegian Army’s military intelligence battalion] will not be operating them close to the frontlines, we will do so from a larger distance back with longer-ranges ones,” the officer said in an interview during Joint Viking.

Norway plans to acquire new drones that will be more suitable to operate in Arctic conditions, with “very long-range” cameras, the officer added.

During the exercise, another drone that the unit deployed to conduct surveillance missions was the U.S.-made Puma, manufactured by AeroVironment.